We may just be pushing this PandoMonthly thing a bit too far. We started out with the ambition of exploding the traditional, expensive, and exhausting three day tech conference by giving you a monthly event with pizza, beer, networking, and one big name guest.

That certainly wasn’t easy or cheap — considering we also wanted to dramatically compress the typical ticket prices and keep the audience to an intimate size. Some would say, it doesn’t make any business sense at all. But those people would probably also argue a blog shouldn’t have an illustrator on staff. (We don’t like those people.)

And yet, somehow our events team has done the impossible. Our San Francisco lineup has been a murderer’s row of investors and entrepreneurs, and the tickets have sold out rapidly no matter how much we’ve stretched capacity. Our June event with Ben Horowitz, sold some 500 tickets in less than a day. We’re even getting in actual, large checks from upcoming sponsors. I mean “large” as in the number of zeros. They aren’t actual novelty checks. Sadly. (If you’d like to write one, we’d love to cash it. Email Jeanne (at) PandoDaily (dot) com for details.)

In May, we did our first New York event, and despite a torrential rainstorm, we had a solid turnout for a conversation with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. It has been one of the most watched of our live streams and one of the staff’s favorite conversations so far.

But more than that, what I loved about Matt’s talk was how different it was from a typical San Francisco PandoMonthly. He talked about how he’s inspired by New York’s cultural diversity, and how he fears the Valley might even be destroying the world. And the questions — including his favorite hip hop artists — reflected the diversity of the crowd.

This is what PandoMonthly is all about. It’s less about bites of THIS PRODUCT IS COMING OUT or WE RAISED THIS AMOUNT breaking news, and more about the people who drive innovation, the brutal decisions they faced, the mistakes they made, and the culture surrounding them. In San Francisco, it’s heavily about the Valley, but in other cities we don’t want to airlift the Valley’s culture. It’s about celebrating the unique startup cultures that are emerging elsewhere.

Every time we’ve talked about bringing the event to another city, people have told us we should raise the ticket prices and advised us to skip the locals and bring big names from the Valley. We disagree on both. We travel to other cities expressly to interview non-Valley people. We only bring the series to cities where we believe there are big enough names that we don’t need Valley imports. Instead of dragging the Valley around, we are bringing a world of entrepreneurs to learn from new spots, via the lifestream and our coverage. That may mean we make less money or sell fewer tickets or just outright fail in other cities. But we’re fine with that gamble.

So with that lengthly preamble, we’re giving details on July — our first three-city PandoMonthly month. The tickets for PandoMonthly always go on sale exactly a week before the event. And with the exception of our first New York event, they have always sold out rapidly. So if you want one, mark your calendars and follow us on Twitter.

Los Angeles July 12: We are doing our first ever PandoMonthly in LA, and our guest is basically the No. 1 guy you’d want at an LA event about entrepreneurship: Elon Musk. As Francisco Dao recently wrote, Musk is an entrepreneur that defies characterization. I mean, he was one of the main inspirations for Tony Stark in Iron Man. Need I say more?

Because he is busy running two massive, world-changing companies, we only have Elon for an hour, and that hour starts promptly at 6 pm. I know there’s legendarily bad traffic in LA, but get off work early and get to the venue at 5 pm for pizza, beer, and a seat. If you approach this Dodger-fan-style, you may miss out.

We’re not yet sure how often we’ll do the PandoMonthly events in LA, but if this one goes well, it won’t be the last. As regular readers know we’re closely watching the LA scene, and mostly bullish about the companies there.

And if you are a San Francisco season pass holder, we’re happy to let you attend the Elon event for free if you want to make the trek. Just email Oni to let her know you are coming.

The venue will be Cross Campus in Santa Monica, and tickets go on sale this Thursday July 5.

San Francisco July 19: Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus will be our guest, and it’ll be epic. Pincus is a big enough name and Zynga has been in the news enough lately that I probably don’t have to add much on why it’ll be so epic.

We’ll have Mark at the usual time and the usual place — 7 pm at Madrone Studios. Doors open for pizza and beer at 6 pm, as usual. Tickets will go on sale July 12.

New York July 26: Rob Burnett, CEO of WorldWide Pants, will be our guest. This may seem like a curveball, given our typical lineup, but it says a lot about how we see these events unfolding in cities like New York and LA.

Frequently the most successful entrepreneurs in these ecosystems draw on the strengths in those cities. Typically that involves industries that are clashing with technology, and we want to bring those voices into the conversation as well. For both cities, old media and traditional entertainment are right up there with the technology industry’s “frenemies.”

Burnett has recently made a movie that’s all about the level playing field technology and the Web has created when it comes to filmmaking — and the limits of that. As we wrote about a few months ago, he’s done some creative things to crowd source aspects of the film itself.

Burnett– and WorldWide Pants– is best know as the producer of “Late Night with David Letterman” and “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson”. (It’s hard to get much more NYC than Letterman.) He has also produced hit shows like “Everybody Loves Raymond” and the cult-hit “Ed”. As such, his business is simultaneously being disrupted, if kids keep cutting the TV cord and benefitting from alternative distribution methods like Netflix as well. We’ll sort through these promises and fears as we talk about flimmaking and TV in the digital age.

He’s easily the funniest guest we’ve ever had too — as you might guess given his profession.

Our New York venue is unfortunately still TBD, but those tickets will go on sale July 19.

The thing that most excites me about this lineup — taken together — is how diverse it is. We have three moguls who have between them disrupted at least five industries. It’ll be a crazy logistical month for our small team, but we hope you enjoy everything we have in store for you.

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily.
She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011).
She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]

Google’s product head, Sundar Pichai, said during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that the company’s wireless network will debut in the United States in the “coming months.” Asked about the network’s features, Pichai said that it wants to “experiment” like it has with Android, and that it has carrier partners with which it’s working. [Source: TechCrunch]